When an initial premise has no supporting evidence,

all arguments based on it also lack evidence.

Almost all religious arguments and apologia begin with a premise that has no evidence to support it.

It's logical failure from the get-go. No amount of apologetic frenzy can prove the initial premise to be true. In fact, there is no evidence to support the premise that a deity exists or deities exist. None has ever been presented.

If the initial premise is not true, the rest of the argument fails as well.

40. Read. The. Post.

Fuck this. Fine I believe the stunning lack of any evidence that your gods exist to be highly convincing. In all likelihood your gods do not exist.

You sir, on the other hand, appear to view the same complete lack of evidence for the existence of your loathsome gods to be a confirmation of their existence.

At no point in this thread, anywhere in this forum, or anywhere on DU have I *ever* advocated for the existence of gods. Voltaire2 knows this. His reply was meant for you. He cleared up the confusion in post #33, re-asserting that the claim of confirmation bias was directed at YOU.

If this is the hill you've chosen to die on, so be it. This is probably one of your most humiliating defeats, and that's saying something.

52. I've explained this already.

It has happened to pretty much anyone who's been on DU for at least a little while, I imagine. Why, it's probably even happened to YOU. He clicked on the wrong post to Reply to. His reply was for YOU, not for ME, as he admitted in post #41. Read it.

Now do I need to explain this again? Do you really want to humiliate yourself further? I am not so stupid as to expect any kind of apology or contrition for your error and subsequent harassment of me, but we can draw this out as long as you like. You know how much I love to see you make a fool of yourself, so please, decide what you want to do.

43. I accept you offer nothing more than canned responses

19. No

I don't "believe" there is no deity. It is not based on belief.
I see no evidence for it. I don't accept one exists based on facts.
I see no evidence for bigfoot or UFOs or ghost or ESP or Touch Therapy or many other things for which there is no proof.

These are not matters of belief or faith.

What i see is a Universe that is explained more accurately without any of the deities of any religion.

32. No

10. Why would anyone state that as a premise?

I would say, instead, "No evidence exists showing that any deity or deities exist."

A negative statement requires no proof and cannot be proven. If you have evidence of the existence of a deity, you can simply present it, and my statement will be false.

It is the same as if I said, "There is no such real animal as a unicorn." Unless you can produce evidence of a unicorn, the negative statement is true. However, if you state that Unicorns exist and live in deep dark forests, the burden of demonstrating the truth of your statement is on you. Negative statements have no such burden of proof.

Here's the thing: I would not base a logical argument on a negative premise. If I say there are no deities, nothing about deities follows from that, because no deities exist. There is no substance on which to base a logical argument. If you wish to have an argument about deities, you must first produce evidence of them. Otherwise there is no substance to your argument, either, since you begin with a different premise.

16. There is a difference between a scientific mind and a non-scientific mind

In science whatever statement of "belief" you make is always based on evidence or lack of it. It's usually implicit because there is usually a lot of evidence to look at. If someone with a scientific mindset says, "I believe in the theory of general relativity," he is make an implicit reference to the 100 years worth of evidence behind it. Likewise, "I do not believe in any deities," refers to the lack of evidence. In both cases, the evidence comes first.

In a non-scientific mind, belief comes first. "I believe in God" is a statement without reference to evidence. Supporting evidence, is either not required or comes afterward. Such people have a hard time understanding the scientific mindset that requires evidence first, they just assume everyone believes first. Their "belief in belief" is itself without evidence, and so they can't be convinced there is another way to handle beliefs and evidence.

This is not to say that all scientists use their scientific minds in religion. Many just leave it at the laboratory and are no more scientific in their religious life than non-scientists.

51. Reality is

A perception more than folks want to believe. Your eyes and brains don't take perfect pictures of reality there's a lot of stitching and filling in going on. We don't even agree on what color something is.

58. The best answer is

maybe. Our reality is built on our perception. That's it, full stop.

We can't see past our perception so for each individual, perception is literally reality in the sense of incoming stimuli being "processed" by our brains. Our reality comes from what, our senses...and our senses are heavily processed by our brains. We see patterns that aren't there, we hear sounds that aren't there, everything we sense is technically a tiny bit in the past by the time we sense it, we literally don't see our nose in front of our face because our brain edits it out of our sight.

Now, I personally think there's at least some version of objective reality...the ground is always beneath, fire is always hot, I will always fall towards the ground...basic stuff. But quantum physics throws a lot of basic stuff into the trash bin...effect preceding cause, things interacting with themselves, things being in two places at once, reality depending on observation (double slit experiment)...maybe Einstein is wrong, maybe the moon isn't there until it's observed.

I mean it probably is.

And I can't be sure that my brain isn't in a vat, and some experiment is just feeding me sensory information, and I'm either interacting with other vat brains or I'm the only vat brain interacting with computer generated people...or that I'm really a complicated program that thinks it's a human. I mean, I feel pretty sure neither of those things are true, but I also probably can't rule them out either.

So all that is to say, yes reality is probably reality...but there's a fuzziness there folks shouldn't forget either.